Haley and Lacey were two sisters that were always in competition with one another. They tried to out do one another, whether is was in a swimming competition or just a 3k race. Lacey always tried to outshine Haley because Lacey hated to lose.

Although Haley loved Lacey to death, she got tired of Lacey always beating her in everything. One day, they got on the topic of money. They both agreed that they needed to save more money. After all, they could never afford the fancy cars and exotic vacations that their friends went on every summer. They both decided that they were going to invest some of their savings. Of course, it became a competition, too. They wanted to see who could make the greatest return on their investment after 6 months.

Lacey and Haley both went home and researched the best investment plan. They realized their resources were scarce. However, Haley quickly decided she was going to buy stock in Starbucks. She liked stocks, because it thrilled her to think that she would have a certicate of ownership in the Starbuck's corporation. After all, it was her favorite coffee place and she knew she invested a lot of money in the company herself alone. She knew Starbucks was popular everywhere in the U.S.A and was growing big in other countries, too. Starbucks is a company that is known for looking out for their shareholders, so this sounded good to Haley. She invested $5,000 of her savings. Haley monitored her stock every single day.

Lacey decided to invest using mutual funds since it is an $11.6 trillion dollar industry. Mutual funds is an investment program funded by shareholders that trades in diversified holdings and is professionally managed. Lacey liked the idea of it being professionally managed, because she could sit back and let them do all of the work. She searched for big name companies and finally found one named Pimco Total Return with the well-known Bill Gross. She invested $7,500. She thought this was a great company because they had a solid-long term track record and had a great management team. Lacey had always been better with money, so she wasn't worried about the competition at all. In fact, she made a deal with herself that she was so confident with her decision that she wasn't even going to monitor her investment until the end of the 6 months.

After investing their money, Lacey and Haley were very anxious to see who made the best investment, but they had to wait it out for the next 6 months.

The day finally came for Lacey and Haley to see who had made the most return. It turns out, Haley made a 70% return on her investment. Starbucks had opened in 20 new U.S. cities and was introduced in 3 new countries. As a result, there was a lot of growth in sales. This was a huge benefit to Haley's amount in returns.

Lacey was shocked when she checked her return for the first time after 6 months. She found out that her big name company had a huge scandal where an inside employee had been tampering with people's investments causing them to lose huge amounts of money. She didn't have but a 10% return on her investment, which was devastating news. She knew nothing about it, since she decided not to monitor her investments or talk to anyone from the company during the 6 months. Needless to say, she was extremely upset that on top of losing money; she had also lost the bet with Haley.

Lacey learned a very valuable lesson from her first time investing experience . She learned just how important it is to monitor investments with any company, no matter how big or successful. If she had monitored more closely, she could have potentially prevented such a big loss.

In the meantime, Haley continued to invest her returns and had even bigger gains after a year. Lucky for Lacey, Haley shared her profit and even took Lacey on an exotic vacation for her birthday.